Now that my studio is put back together, I unearthed all of the bits to the Metamorphosis quilt (pattern from from Lo & Behold Stitchery) that I’d been working on struggling with. Essentially I’m making a butterfly themed memory quilt out of Hawaiian shirts. The end result will be a throw-size quilt and three coordinating 20″ pillows. The shirts range in size from XXL to 3X, so I have plenty of fabric to do a pieced back for the quilt and pillow covers. Thankfully, there’s also enough fabric left over to fix any screw-ups on matching/coordinating the butterfly wings.
The good news is I’m farther along in the process than I remembered. All I need to do is cut up the rest of the Hawaiian shirts and I can get sewing on the butterfly wings (half circles). I spent this afternoon doing just that. As is standard practice with t-shirt quilts, I bagged up all the leftover shirt materials and put them aside for safekeeping. I keep any leftover bits until the finished project is delivered to the recipient.
The goal is to finish remaining butterflies this week, so I can assemble the quilt top and start quilting. My plan is to echo quilt the semi-circles on the wings and do a small meander on the blue background with a wave/ribbon candy in the sashing.
The class I took at the Garden of Quilts with Fran Gulick of Cotton & Joy was a big help in overcoming my issues with curved piecing. Here’s that project below:
If I ever attempt a memory quilt project with curved piecing again, I’m going to treat the clothing like I do t-shirts in a t-shirt quilt – stabilize anything that moves. The slippery rayon shirts have been a bit of a challenge to maneuver under the needle. I am stitching on my Janome 8900 using the HP foot (looks like Singer FW original presser foot), straight stitch needle plate, stitch D4 with settings of SL= 2.0 and SW=.6, and a purple tip needle with Wonderfil DecoBob (80 wt) thread. I am extremely happy with the results.
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